Home Front

This resource is aimed at secondary school students and contains over 20 pages of activities.

The online materials draw on the rich collection of photos and the brief history provided in the Australians in World War I: Home Front commemorative publication, which was printed in early 2012 and is the fifth and final book in the series.

Chapter 4: The enemy within

German troops pushed almost to Paris but failed to take the city. Just as welcome for Australians was the growing sense that a Japanese attack was unlikely. There was probably a huge, unspoken relief that the war would be fought far from Australia.

Yet there were fears of sedition and sabotage. Hundreds of migrants from what were now enemy lands were under orders to return home and enlist, and some Australians of German origin secretly rejoiced at enemy victories. 'I must state that my very good wishes are with Germany', one woman wrote in a family letter.1 Words like those were one reason why Andrew Fisher’s Labor government, elected to office in September 1914, passed a War Precautions Act that awarded itself the power to introduce almost any regulations it judged necessary for Australia’s security.2

Within months an open, casual society became a vigilant one. Police raided mining companies to ensure minerals would not reach Germany. Military censors began opening and reading mail passing through post offices, and telling newspaper proprietors what stories they should avoid. Army officers monitored and later detained men born in enemy lands. Seven thousand were eventually interned behind barbed wire, most of them subjects of the German and Austrian emperors. They idled away the months and then the years in simple huts or cells, hoping the outside world would see them as victims and release them. The outside world held them in suspicion, and feared trouble from any 'aliens' not yet interned. Only in Broken Hill was there any violence, and it came from two men who were just as much British subjects as any other Australians. On New Year’s Day 1915 a butcher and an ice cream seller born in British India obeyed the call of Turkey’s caliph for an armed jihad by all Muslims. They fired rifle shots into a passing train, killing four people.